Also, ttuuxxx has other offerings - I'd suggest trying "Fire Hydrant". It definitely runs in 64MB. It'd be v_e_r_y slow, but it might be worth seeing if it eventually boots ok, and that might provide some pointers to whats suitable and whats not.

What is the "very old software/proprietary hardware" that you're looking to run? There is NO WAY you'll get Wine on this thing -- even DOSBox may be problematic -- there just aren't enough brain cells in it for that. So if you're trying to use a DOS or Win3.x floppy based program on this... I just don't see that working out well.

You know that you can get RS-232 and LPT Cardbus adapters, right? Honestly... given the choice (keep in mind I love messing around with old stuff) I'd pick the adapters first.

All of that said, I'd still like to know, very specifically... what are you wanting to do? (See first sentence of this post.) If you tell us, we can probably help.

I unfortunately need to be able to control a very old and specialized EPROM programmer for certain chips no modern programmer seems to be able to handle. I own several modern programmers but not one of them is able to properly write to these old chips I have, and my only other option would be to dig up a machine with an ISA port and then I have to be lucky enough to even find a matching ISA card...

I'm hoping I can do everything I need to in Linux (don't see why I can't) but if it comes down to it I can always install a Win3.1/95 partition and keep linux on for when I actually want to use it .

What's even weirder is i I got hired to repair some company's old video processor unit where the only video output you can use for diagnostics is something with another proprietary interface. But guess what the only card they have to test it with is.... Zoomed Video. *shoots self in head*

By the way thanks for letting me know about those old Puppy builds. Looking forward to trying out 0.4 and 1.0.3 on this old thing.

If you don't have the skills to build it, I can -- but I've no EPROMs to test with. The only part I can't afford is the shipping, which would be $6.00 in the US, and $15.00 outside of the US (all currencies in this post are in US Dollars!).

Mouser Electronics stocks most of the parts. 74HC164 ICs are $0.37 each, and the 74HC299 is $0.82. I can throw that together with a parallel port dongle (connector $2.29 at Radio Shack; I've got plenty of ribbon cables I can slice up) and some wire and perfboard (perf $3.49 at Radio Shack; I've got the wire). Mouser will charge me $4.95 for shipping, because they're silly like that. Total cost $12.29 + shipping to you.

If that programmer can work for you, let me know, and I'll do it. I'll have $30 that I can spend by the end of tomorrow.

BTW, if you're familiar with the blog site HackaDay, that's where I heard of this. It's DEFINITELY not mine! (@Flash: not about people making computers do bad things -- just people making devices do nifty things that they're not originally designed for.)_________________

If you don't have the skills to build it, I can -- but I've no EPROMs to test with. The only part I can't afford is the shipping, which would be $6.00 in the US, and $15.00 outside of the US (all currencies in this post are in US Dollars!).

Mouser Electronics stocks most of the parts. 74HC164 ICs are $0.37 each, and the 74HC299 is $0.82. I can throw that together with a parallel port dongle (connector $2.29 at Radio Shack; I've got plenty of ribbon cables I can slice up) and some wire and perfboard (perf $3.49 at Radio Shack; I've got the wire). Mouser will charge me $4.95 for shipping, because they're silly like that. Total cost $12.29 + shipping to you.

If that programmer can work for you, let me know, and I'll do it. I'll have $30 that I can spend by the end of tomorrow.

BTW, if you're familiar with the blog site HackaDay, that's where I heard of this. It's DEFINITELY not mine! (@Flash: not about people making computers do bad things -- just people making devices do nifty things that they're not originally designed for.)

I will have to do some more research on this design! I am not bad with a soldering iron but my main problem is I'm trying to program chips that are so long out of production and lost in obscurity. Working with ancient arcade boards can be a real headache, especially when all documentation of many boards are lost and gone forever!

I don't frequent hackaday much anymore but maybe I should... If this cheap EPROM solution can program my weird old chips I'd be amazed

I don't know if I mentioned but I have a Willem GQ-4X which is really wonderful for about everything but ancient undocumented chips

Somehow I forgot that the chip would need an IC socket make that cost estimate $12.53 for the addition of a $0.24 28pin DIP socket. (Sorry, ZIF DIP sockets are nutso expensive at Mouser -- like $15+ !!)

EDIT: Kevin, I owe you an apology -- give pUPnGO 2012 (start with the textmaker one, don't bother with the freeoffice one) a chance -- I seem to have had a bad download on that one. Was using it to test out a really old monitor today, and it gave me the same bellyache that it did when I ran it before, trying to help you. (This is on much newer hardware!)_________________

I have an old laptop, 700mhz, with 512m of RAM, that I thought would be ideal for use as a Media player connected to a TV, particularly for playing MP4 videos downloaded from YOUTUBE.
It soon became clear that only a Puppy would be speedy enough.
As it turned out only 214x-Top10 worked for me straight out of the box, without totally hammering the CPU, or issues with video and/or viewability.

I'm running Puppy 2.14x on an Athlon 1.8 Ghz, 256 MB RAM, bought back in 2003.
There's also Win98 on it and SuSE Linux 10.0 (2005) (current SuSE would be OpenSuSE 12.2, connected to Novell now, which doesn't work on this system).
Reason for Puppy is, the old SuSE MPlayer doesn't play all current videos, newer Flash-Vids or newer HTML/JavaScript won't work either.
But Puppy 2.14x just does it (though a little slow on this machine sometimes, probably because of RAM). Still really great! Thank you so much!

One thing I also use on this setup, is my Perl-script "shufflemp3-0.8.pl" to quickly cycle through mp3s in a directory (and below) on the console and play them with mpg123/mpg321.
Puppy 2.14x already comes with Perl and mpg123/mg321 (or it can be easily compiled), so just the two modules "AUDIO::PLAY::MPG123" and "Term::ReadKey" would also be needed.
To compile, you just do

1. At first, I wanted a "full harddisk install" of Puppy 2.14X, but when I did that, I sometimes got "Kernel panic", which is fatal, of course. I had this problems with other versions of Puppy too. Maybe it's my system.
What worked without any problems was a "frugal install" though. No "Kernel panic" that way. No idea, why.
I think, it's not worth, going after that problem, because "frugal install" doesn't have that many drawbacks.

2. Some programs, I really missed, could be installed or compiled afterwards, sometimes even current versions from the projects' websites:

- vim - My favourite editor (your mileage may vary) (sorry, ttuuxxx, you probably had your reasons to kick it out by default).
- The Terminus Font - My favourite console-font, which can be configured with rather large font-sizes (better for the eyes) - couldn't live without it.
- The Midnight Commander - Powerful two-panel-file-manager: I just used the Puppy-2.x-pet from the ibiblio-Site.
- Audacity - Powerful sound-editor: A nice version could be found in this thread: Again: Amazing support, ttuuxxx, thank you so much!

- And last, but not least: Today I managed to compile the current version of MPlayer, actually from this file, MPlayer-1.1.tar.gz.
Now, that was really amazing, because I had tried this several times on SuSE 10.0 without success, because the compiler (gcc etc.) was too old. It seems, Puppy 2.14x comes with a much newer compiler-version, that can handle much newer source-code of other programs. Very cool!
For mplayer, I just had to do "./configure; make; make install". It took about an hour on my system. But it just went through to the end. I was very surprised to see that.

I don't know if this has been asked before, if yes, I apologize. But does this pup even support WPA2 encryption? Cause I'm having major issues with WPA2. I've only managed to connect once (still on LiveUSB) and ever since I did a full install I get the wrong password pop-up (alphanumeric or hexadecimal). Its like its still set to WEP even if I set it to WPA2. I can connect via the open guest network, but nothing else.

Posted: Sat 18 May 2013, 14:52 Post_subject:
help with b43 pcmciaSub_title: 2.14X support for b43 pcmcia

I have been a big fan of the 2.14-2.18 puppys. I have 2.14x running on one of my computers. ...but I have a Dell inspiron 1501 that has a b43 pcmcia wireless in it and I can't find a driver for it. I have tried using some of the pets from the forum for b43 pcmcia but none work. I was wondering if there was pet I could down load that would allow me to load it for puppy 2.14X ?
Thanks
Mike